Today I want to briefly talk about how Google works out what navigational queries are, what a navigational query is, and how we can make money from it. It’s a pretty easy concept to get to grips with, but I like it because it’s a fast way to make some party money.

What is a “navigational query”?
When you perform a search on Google, it has to have some kind of stab at what the motivation behind your search is. Lets say you setup a company called “Beds and Mattresses” and you build yourself a cute little homepage. Now when a user performs a search for “beds and mattresses” Google has to work out whether you are generically searching for some beds and mattresses, or if you are specifically searching for that company.

If Google thinks you are searching specifically for that company/brand/website, then your search will be treated as a “navigational query”, which means that website will be given greater preference in the SERPs, and will rank well (normally #1) regardless of the site’s link popularity and authority.

A little bit of proof
If you haven’t noticed this before, the evidence is all around you! For instance, lets do a search for “property in france” - a query with over 30,000 monthly searches.

You can see that the propertyinfrance.co.uk website ranks #1 with a lower PR and way, way fewer links. As a note, propertyinfrance.co.uk also is not the oldest domain, with some the domains in that screenshot out-aging it by 5 years - so it’s not down to that.

To me, that’s kind of surprising, it’s a real estate search term with a decent amount of monthly traffic and there’s a lot of money in real estate traffic. Google doesn’t like doing corrections “by hand”, so I find it odd that these high volume & value terms are not algorithmically bias towards general search, rather than navigational queries. Cheers, Google.

Making money from navigation queries
Okay, so how can we make money from this? First, lets talk about revenue streams. It’s always important to think hard about the intent of your visitors when you’re trying to monetise your site. For instance, I would never run AdSense on this blog - my visitors come here for information and most of them are techy/SEO types. To me this says that Adsense would add no value to my visitors, most of them are aware of Adsense and so I’d get a pretty low CTR (á la Digg users). I don’t particularly like seeing Adsense on SEO blogs because it makes me suspicious of the motives of the author, it almost makes me feel like they are only writing to make a quick buck. I do however give (normally labelled) affiliate links to products or services that I’m currently using and think are decent, when they are relevant.

The point here is, it’s actually going to be easier using a specific CPA offer, rather than a shotgun Adsense approach and hoping somebody will click on one of the contextual ads. The Google Referrals programme, inside Adsense, allows you to browse through these ads and select a specific one for your page.

Google’s “Referrals 2.0″ is basically the CPA part of their Adsense programme - i.e. you get paid when the user performs an action rather than a click. Using Google Referrals 2.0, I set a site up in an hour and within 7 days was making $15 a day from it, with no SEO or extra promotion whatsoever. Here’s how I did it:

1) First off, I scanned through Google Referrals in my Adsense account, looking for a CPA offer. Ideally you want something where you get paid to get someone to perform a free action, as this is dead easy to do.

2) I used the standard keyword research tools to identify how competitive what I thought the “main” search term for this product/service was. I found one with a mere 300 searches per month.

3) Next I registered a domain with the URL exactly the same as this keyphrase.

4) I created a single landing page and made the title, the h1 the key phrase, as well as dotting it around the copy (which must be unique of course). Matching the URL, title, h1 is normally enough to trick Google into thinking the search is a navigational query.

5) I wrote the copy of the page, explaining the product, had a screenshot and put the ad in a nice fat outlined box in the middle of the page - it’s the only external route out of the page.

6) Google can be a bit stubborn when it comes to indexing a single page, so keep at it and build links as you usually would.

The Google Referral TOS is slightly different, allowing you to draw more attention to the advert, since the pay out is CPA, not CPC - read through it carefully and use this to your advantage. I’m achieving a 30% CTR with a pretty poor looking page, and I am converting 50% of these people to the free sign up offer and getting paid $15 a time.

There it is. It’s so simple, it’s so quick and it works. I love these 1 shot quick methods at getting a little extra cash. So 2 hours work should benefit me around $5,000 a year.

If you don’t have an Adsense account yet, here’s a massive affiliate link for you

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently making a front-end for my own personal SEO tools, so I can finally release them to Digerati subscribers. These tools are special. They are not your normal “pay us $20 and we’ll show you a vague kind of thing how Google probably crawls you site” tools. They are, elite SEO tools.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the frontliners:

Link Backrub - This tool will increase your backlinks massively by scouring the Internet for sites that link to you, that are not indexed in search engines. Any links it finds to your site, which are not indexed by Google, it will get them indexed - almost instantly, thus letting Google see all of your backlinks. This will of course, improve your rankings.

Flashdex - This tool will get ANY page indexed in Google within 1 hour - guaranteed.

Social Storm - This neat little bit of script can get a single page - or multiple pages socially bookmarked on the top 20 social bookmarking and tagging sites over 190 times, automatically, from different IPs at random times over the course of weeks. This can give you massive traffic boosts.

StumbleXchange Automator - StumbleXchange is a great site, but it takes so damn long! This downloadable program will automate the entire process for you! No more hours of stumbling other peoples pages, just click and go to sleep!

Link Buster - My favourite tool - This tool will build you over 100 relevant links per month, to any page requested - and it’s not blackhat!

These tools are all working at the moment, but I require a dozen or so experienced testers for them. I plan the official release on 1st November, when the testing and refinements are complete. Due to the nature of the tools, the sign ups will be limited and I most likely will be charging a little fee to access them.

If you are one of the testers for these tools and give feedback on their development, you will have lifetime free access to them. If you would like to sign up to be a tester, leave a trackback to this post by writing your own blog post about these tools. 20 people will be chosen at random, then after a chat, 10 will be chosen to help me test and refine these tools.

Go!

This is a jumbo post which I have contributed to Jon Waraas’ Blog so you’ll have to pop over there to read it. It’s a bit of a biggie (about 3,000 words).

I’ve also been working on that as well as the next part of Making Money With An Affiliate Empire series, so with a bit of luck that should be live by the end of the week..

I also have a special announcement later in the week, which you’ll like. That’s going to be first come, first served though

I like to think of websites as flowers. Now just before you unsubscribe to my feed, de-bookmark my site and thumbs down me on stumble, hear me out. It’s actually a pretty good analogy!

Okay, so I don’t literally think of websites as flowers, but I’m going to roll with this because I think it makes everything a bit more interesting to imagine pretty flowers than Googlebots (what does a Googlebot look like anyway??). I was looking at some SEO forums today and I saw some pretty bad advice being dished out, unfortunately a lot of people were agreeing as well. So I guess this post is really to bust some link building myths and most importantly, give you a perspective where you can make your own link building decisions.

Simplifying things, there are two main things that are measured when looking at link profiles with websites:

Authority
Gaining links from highly ranked powerful sites, will of course pass some of this authority onto your website. Getting some authority links shows your website is trusted and isn’t a pill-popping-phishing-farm.info. Obtaining these kinds of links tends to be tricky, because you generally have nothing to offer these websites and a lot of them will rather just compete with you than help you out, because they are in the dominant position. Google has to be more careful nowadays and use a series of measures to rank websites as there’s a lot of webmasters who are whipping up their own authority real estate and using it to their own ends [insert evil laugh]. While helpful, in competitive market link building, a few big authority links aren’t going to have you sitting #1. So Google also takes close stock of…

Popularity
Link popularity! Diving head first into dangerous PageRank “is it meaningful, is it not”? territory. I’m not even going to touch on that subject, there are a lot of people who’d rank a whole lot better, if only they spent the time they stare at that stupid green bar actually doing some SEO! I really want to talk about Link Profiling.

Link Profiles
To understand how important this is, we’re going to use my wonderful flower analogy. So lets imagine we’re at a flower show and everyone has put their flowers (websites) out on display. The flower judge (Google) is going to come along and rank these flowers in order of how big and well developed they are. Unfortunately, our judge is blind. So he can’t tell how beautiful the flowers are, only how big they are. However, our judge can still judge the show, because he has a clever way of working out how beautiful the flowers are as well.

Since this is a kind of weird flower show, there are some extra rules. Everyone with flowers is allowed to take some of their flower food and give it to what they think are the beautiful flowers in the show to help them grow some more. Naturally, the biggest and most beautiful flowers attract the most food and grow even quicker. However, there are also some small flowers with really nice, um “buds” on them that attract a few people so they get a nice boost too.

So the flower judge goes around and ranks the best flowers as he sees (hawhaw) fit and takes notes on how well everyone is doing. He sees some really bad flowers too, seriously, they’re like f**king twigs and nobody has fed them at all.

Since the flower show as over 100 billion flowers in it, the judge really never gets a rest. He kind of does laps constantly re-ranking flowers, getting minimum wage in his never ending job. So when we get back to our first group of flowers again, everyone has been working hard on growing them. Poor old twig man’s flower is still looking as crap as ever. So twig man walks around the field before the show and picks up all the flower food he can find that other people have dropped. This flower food is a bit rotten, but it’s certainly better than nothing. The food makes his flower grow a lot bigger, but not all that beautiful. “That’s okay” he thinks, “The judge is blind, he can’t see my flower isn’t beautiful and I’ll be sure to win!”.

When re-ranking the flowers, the judge comes twig man’s flower and has a feel and thinks “Well, this is has certainly grown quickly compared to the other 100,000,000,000 flowers in the show. It must be quite a beautiful flower, I’ll rank him a bit higher”. Twig man is dead chuffed and his flower gets 10th position in his flower niche.

Before the judge comes around again, twig man sets off to find more dropped flower food. Crap! There’s nowhere near as much as last time and what is left is really rotten! Still, nobody is feeding twig man’s plant for him, even though it’s a big plant, it’s an ugly plant. So twig man feeds his plant what bits of rotten food he can. When the judge finally returns and examines twig man’s plant again, he thinks “That’s strange. This plant had grown a lot last time I saw it. Now it has hardly grown at all. Almost all of the other plants, when they start to bloom, grow faster month on month. I think this man is cheating…”

..and so twig man of course loses his place in the flower show…

WTF? Can you say that again, without the patronizing story?
Okay, so what we’re describing here (if my little story wasn’t too abstract): flower food is links, the size (authority) of the flower (site) is relevant to how much food (links) it has and how beautiful a flower is describes the quality of it’s content. The amount of flowers in the show is trying to demonstrate how much comparative data Google has at it’s disposal. So, what you may think you can squeeze by, will stand out like a sore thumb when compared to the profiles of millions of other pages in your niche.

Googlebot’s are not human so they really read your content and decide on it’s actual quality. Googlebots rely heavily on links and most importantly, trends in links. The best term I’ve heard used is the “organic bloom” effect, which describes a continued up-surge in links. The theory is; if you write some excellent content, people will link to it, people follow these links, agree it’s good content and link to you as well. This effect is exponential, the more links you have, the more new links you are likely to attract overtime. It can be quite obvious to Google that you have poor content if you try wham 100 top directory links at your site, they get indexed then the following months you get nothing. If you had great content, your website would continue growing.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn into one of those people that says “The best SEO is just write good content”, because that’s not SEO, that’s just writing good content and having a worthwhile website and frankly people that say that are cop outs. There are ways that you can mimic the “organic bloom” effect and make Google think you’ve got the best website in your field.

Which brings me neatly to the crap I saw on an SEO forum today…
A chap was asking how many directories he should submit his site to and if he should outsource the work. He said he had found people offering 500/1000 directory submissions for $200. The advice given to him by the resident “SEO Experts” was “only to submit to the top 50 directories, everything else is a waste of time”.

My outlook is this; a “top” directory is obviously popular and therefore normally has 2 million other links in it, reducing the quality of the link you receive, so although the link will get indexed, it’s still only a directory link at the end of the day. Also, as we just demonstrated what good is having 50 new links just suddenly appear to your website? Guff all.

Yes, small directories may seem like a waste of time, however they also provide this “organic bloom” effect. If you pay $300 for 1,200 directory submissions, you’re guaranteed to get new links indexed every month for absolutely ages. Not to mention the time you’re going to save. If you can find someone with a good reputation to manually do these links for you, it’s worth forking out so you can spend your time working on more advanced tactics.

The organic bloom effect is the exact reason that link laundering and exploiting link velocity works so well. I’ve been approached many times by e-commerce clients asking for help with SEO, because they are in a sticky position with content. People don’t go to e-commerce sites for great content, they skim a variety of sites for research then land on a chosen e-commerce site to buy. Sometimes optimising a page for links/search engines is at the other end of the scale to optimising for purchase conversions.

If you’ve got a site like this and your competition is outranking you just because they’re older and bigger, copying the organic bloom effect can make Google think your site is more beautiful and you’ll have an advantage that your competition didn’t even know existed. That will give them something to think about when their staring at their silver medal!

edit:

Found this search “recommendation” somewhat amusing:

Hehe

I thought I’d share with you a few tricks I’ve picked up along the way with Adwords. When starting a campaign, one of the most important things is to get a good CTR (Click Through Ratio). Google will give your campaign a “quality score”, part of which is the CTR. If you get a good quality score, your ad will show higher up in the Pay Per Click results, for less cash per click.

1. Use non-alphanumeric characters

Much how Eli talked about using non-alphanumeric characters in SERP results to increase CTR, we can do the same with Adwords. For instance:

Which of these two adverts stands out the most? Try running an ad rotation with the identical ad, one with “arrows” and one without. I bet this month’s Adsense you get a higher CTR on our little arrowed friend! If you want to give the arrows a try, you could copy and paste them from here: 》ã€Å

2. Sometimes less is…

Another interesting technique is doing something which seems totally illogical. Cut your ads off early and add a “…” at the end of the advert. This triggers a response in a lot of people, assuming there is more information will automatically be drawn to your advert.

So we’ll have something that looks like this:

3. Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Something that will really attract clicks is if you can get your title to exactly match the user’s search query. Rather than writing thousands of adverts, you can use (a sparsely documented) feature of Adwords, DKI.

You can use DKI anywhere in your adverts.. in the title, description line 1 or 2, display url and in your destination url (Usually for tracking purposes, be careful not to break your links with this method!)

Ok, how do I use Dynamic Keyword Insertion then?

You specify how you’d like the dynamic keywords displayed, and give a default phrase which will be displayed if your dynamic keywords cannot for whatever reason. The format is below:

{keyword:defaulttext}

You can also use the following capitalization on the work ‘keyword’ to get different effects:

* keyword - no capitalization
* Keyword - First word is capitalized
* KeyWord - Every Word Is Capitalized
* KEYword - EVERY letter in first word is capitalized
* KEYWord - LIKE Above But With Each Word Capitalized
* KEYWORD - EVERY LETTER IS CAPITALIZED

Example:

{KeyWord:Widgets}
Buy your {Keyword:Widgets} here
{KEYword:Widgets} with free delivery!

User searches for ‘blue widgets’, which you have as a targeted term.

The resulting advert:

Blue Widgets
Buy your Blue widgets here
BLUE widgets with free delivery!

If anyone else has any quick tips that you don’t see everywhere else on the net, drop them in as a comment and share! Id love to hear what everyone else is doing, I’ve been pretty lucky with my Adwords success myself!

Oh, Happy 4th July to all my American readers. Congratulations on escaping British oppression… We’ll get you yet…..